Inspiration Source
Cuban actors insist the show must go on despite blackouts
The article reports on the practical and emotional difficulties facing Havana’s independent theater groups as electricity cuts approach a full day in some neighborhoods. Performances take place without air conditioning, sound systems or reliable transportation, while actors often hold additional job... Full context
The article reports on the practical and emotional difficulties facing Havana’s independent theater groups as electricity cuts approach a full day in some neighborhoods. Performances take place without air conditioning, sound systems or reliable transportation, while actors often hold additional jobs to survive. Despite these conditions and a broader exodus of young artists, performers say their persistence is essential to keeping Cuban theater alive.
Apagón Teatro: Palimpsest for Havana
Apagón Teatro: Palimpsest for Havana stages a moment of theatrical persistence under the pressure of blackout nights. I built the work as a layered collage: photorealistic figures rendered with airbrushed metallic highlights sit against a backdrop of rubbed-away posters and salvaged fabric—textures borrowed from El Anatsui’s economy of refuse but pared down with a monastic restraint. The palette comes from fumarole minerals I’ve studied in residency—sulfur ochres, rusted iron, steam greys—a thermal echo for the heat and lack of ventilation the performers endure. The broken extension cord and the empty podium for a silent speaker are intentional absences: erasure as presence.
This piece is a tribute to the actors who hold extra jobs, the technicians who mend cables with tape and hope, and the young artists who face exile but keep rehearsal rooms breathing. I varnished selected surfaces with a Krafla-derived mineral varnish to create a patchy, archival patina—an attempt to preserve a fragile, improvised culture against literal and institutional erasure. If the work feels almost off-balance, that is deliberate: it mirrors the precarious choreography of survival and the stubborn, communal act of making theater when the lights go out.
About the Artist
Rian Morgan Price
Rian Morgan Price (they/them) is a queer visual artist and educator raised in a tight-knit agricultural farming community in the Welsh valleys. Born into a household of smallholders, Rian learned earl...
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Marco Delacroix
Cultural theorist and curator. Reads art through lenses of discourse, power, and social context.
As a curator interested in how material practice encodes political will, I find Apagón Teatro: Palimpsest for Havana to be a compelling study in staged persistence. Rian Morgan Price translates scarcity into surface, knitting airbrushed photorealism with rubbed posters and salvaged fabric so that absence reads as a form of presence. The geothermal palette, the Krafla varnish, and the nod to El Anatsui create a tactile archive of improvisation, where varnish becomes a small act of preservation against institutional forgetting.
Formally the piece is rigorous, an exercise in disciplined restraint that lets fracture do the speaking. The broken extension cord and the empty podium operate as minimalist props and as discursive operators, pointing to labor, precarity, and exile without spelling out the narrative. The work sits productively between conceptual restraint and painterly craft, its off balance composition echoing the choreography of survival in blackout nights. I particularly value how the artist mobilizes community pedagogy, the skate DIY ethic, and monastic asceticism into a coherent aesthetic and ethical program.
My reservation is curatorial rather than technical. The very beauty of the surfaces risks aestheticizing hardship when removed from context, so the work demands an exhibition that foregrounds the actors and technicians it cites, and that supports forms of restitution or visibility beyond sympathetic viewing. Presented with that care, this palimpsest functions not only as elegy, but as a tactical object of memory and solidarity.
Material palimpsest and surface treatment Technical airbrush mastery Use of absence as political signifier Institutional critique and solidarity Geothermal inspired palette Curatorial and community potentialOct 9, 2026